LONDON: In the first few days, it was possible to pigeonhole the Washington D.C sniper as just another American crime tale. The longer the sniper saga has continued, though, the wider its significance has grown. Tragically, the deaths in the suburbs of America’s capital city have now become an all-too-eloquent illustration of some of the deepest problems faced by the modern US at home and abroad.

It is, of course, true that the British have an unhealthy obsession with American shooting stories. A mass shooting thousands of miles away in the middle of Kansas or California is an event that grips us far more readily than a similar sort of incident a few hundred miles away in Europe. There was an astoundingly awful mass killing near Turin this week, for instance. Eight dead in one day. But the story ended up as a one-paragraph story in the broadsheet press and was ignored in the rest.

That is largely because American killings have infinitely greater cultural power. They have this power in part because they play into the deep need of the British — and of Europeans in general — to depict America as a far more violent country than it really is. This isn’t the whole story, but we ignore at our peril the fact that in many respects, including crime against the person, Britain is now at least as violent as America.

A common image of Washington is of a city that is by turns rather dull and extremely dangerous. In fact, and in spite of the sniper, neither of these generalisations is near the mark. If Washington ever was the murder capital of the United States, it isn’t any longer. That title has been captured by Atlanta — and just the other day a friend was telling me how much safer it feels to walk the streets of that city in recent times.

Indeed, my own overall impression of Washington — and of lots of places in the US like it — was that I have never lived in a more relaxed, polite, friendly or normal place in my life. Of course, it all depends on what kind of neighbourhood you can afford to live in and how you treat other people. Sure, there is always a story on the local news about the latest slaying or violent road death somewhere in the area. But the general tenor of life in places like Washington is about as close to the realistically attainable good life, in all senses, as one is likely to find on the planet.

The sniper has punctured those secure illusions.

Three weeks after the sniper began his work, two aspects of the story have elevated his reign of fear to more general importance. The first is that at no stage throughout the killings has the gun-control question become a central aspect of either media coverage or the public debate.

The second wider resonance, though, echoes far beyond the Beltway. It echoes, in fact, to the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq and the beaches of Bali. Few people in the United States seem to ask themselves whether there are wider lessons for American strategy to be learned from the continuing failure to catch the sniper operating almost on the White House’s doorstep. Working with the most sophisticated equipment, with no resource constraints of any kind, and with 100 per cent support and cooperation from the local population, the police have neither caught their man nor been able to prevent him from striking again.

You might just think — or hope, or pray — that someone, somewhere in the apparatus of American military and political planning would somehow make the connection between the difficulty of the anti-sniper operation and the complexities of the ‘war on terrorism’.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.